Sign In
0 Items (
Search
Comments (9)
What does two plus two equal? Ask almost anyone and they will quickly answer: four. Or perhaps not so quickly, if you’ve asked a recent arts graduate. But even they will get there, eventually, if born with an adequate finger supply.
Let’s suppose, however, that their answer is the same as four but is expressed in a pointlessly complicated way. “36,527 minus 36,523,” they might reply. Or “the composite number found between the two first-occurring prime numbers”. Or “the square root of sixteen”.
For good reason, you might wonder at the motivation behind this mathematical posturing. Maybe your respondent is seeking to embarrass or confuse you, in which case a beating should be arranged. “How many broken ribs do you have?” you may later ask of that composite-number fellow, as a mathematically-themed part of your payment calculations.
Then again, it could be that concealment is the aim.
Certain people—lawyers, for example, and anyone involved in drafting taxation legislation—delight in disguising simplicity beneath needless complexity. I was once directed to a “ground-based facility” at a concert venue; turns out this was a tent. And every journalist has endured police media conferences featuring lines like: “The vehicle was travelling in a northerly direction when it left the road surface …”
Those last two cases are relatively innocent and easily decoded. Not so the language used by our carbon-panic community, who resort to an extraordinary variety of tricks in order to sell their message of doom. They do this because they cannot otherwise escape one awkward and devastatingly simple fact.
Australia produces just 1.3 per cent of the planet’s alleged global warming gases.
This means that even if Australia were to be removed from the earth in its entirety—every factory, every road, every vehicle, every supermarket, every airport, every head of livestock, every coal mine, every speck of soil and every Australian—it would make no significant difference at all to the planet’s carbon-emissions wellbeing. “If reducing emissions really is necessary to save the planet, our effort, however Herculean, is barely better than futile,” Tony Abbott pointed out last year in his excellent London speech, “because Australia’s total annual emissions are exceeded by just the annual increase in China’s.”
At which point the debate should end. We’re too tiny to cause any climate change impact, so let’s talk about something else. Got any plans for the weekend? Is the V6 version of VW’s Amarok really all that much better than the cheaper four-cylinder? How many hours of community service did you cop for that hit on the prime numbers bloke?
Climate obsessives don’t yield so easily to logical barriers. A few years back they launched the “per capita” argument to express Australia’s carbon output. As you’d expect, this strategy was led by the United Nations. “If the rest of the world emitted carbon gases at the same per person rate as Australia, its population would need seven planets to sustain the pollution, according to a damning United Nations report,” Fairfax’s Adam Morton wrote in 2007. “Australia is third in per capita emissions to the US and Canada, which would both need to spread the world’s people across nine planets.”
One year later, another Fairfax climate crank, Kenneth Davidson, took matters even further. He swept the US and Canada aside and unilaterally appointed Australia as the world’s worst per-capita emitter. “Australia is the highest per capita greenhouse gas polluter in the world, with levels twice those of European countries and Japan, and seven times the per capita emissions of China and India,” he declared.
Davidson was still banging on about our per-capita climate criminality in 2011: “For Australia, as the highest per capita emitter in the world, this means becoming a zero-emissions economy within a decade.”
Or we could just massively increase our population, which would obviously add to our overall carbon dioxide output but at the same time reduce the per capita number—which is apparently the more important figure. A quick check of comparative national outputs, however, showed that Davidson’s UN-derived panic claim was completely wrong. Several nations worldwide have us beaten in the great per capita carbon stakes.
It seems the likes of Qatar and Trinidad and Tobago are the real threats to planetary health. These carbon titans are out to crush the world with their carbon dioxide wickedness.
“We have, in recent times, surpassed giant nations in our impact on the world,” lamented Trinidad and Tobago Newsday journalist Desiree Sampson:
We are at the top of the list of countries with the highest carbon dioxide emissions per capita, second only to Qatar …
Data from the United Nations Statistics Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs lists Trinidad and Tobago as the second largest producer of carbon emissions per capita. “The carbon dioxide emission per capita is among the highest in the world … higher than most of the oil economies of the Middle East.” This is how serious our carbon footprint is.
Oh, relax, Desiree. Trinidad and Tobago produces next to nothing by way of carbon, and is only being picked on by the UN due to the statistical anomaly allowed by a tiny 1.4 million-strong population. You exert no great “impact on the world” aside from giving us some of the greatest cricketers to ever play the game (Brian Lara, Larry Gomes and brilliant wicketkeeper Deryck Murray all emerged from these sparsely-peopled islands).
Your carbon footprint, in realistic, non-UN terms, is sparrow-sized. Trinidad and Tobago’s contribution of human-generated carbon dioxide is only 0.06 per cent of the world’s total.
The UN’s creative climate accounting teaches us very little about the planet’s survivability but does teach us a great deal about the UN’s essential dishonesty. We’d be well rid of this corrupt and corrosive organisation. The UN contains more gangsters and criminals than Chicago in the 1920s. In per capita terms, of course.
PRIOR to the 2012 London Olympics, two members of the Australian swimming team were in the US for pre-Games training when they visited a gun shop. Admiring the products on display, the pair posed for a few photographs which they posted online.
Naturally, because Australia’s media is fantastically firearm-frightened, this caused great distress.
“Controversial swimmers Nick D’Arcy and Kenrick Monk could face sanctions from the Australian Olympic Committee after posting photos of themselves on the internet posing with high powered guns,” Fairfax reported. “D’Arcy and Monk posed with the weapons in a gun shop in the US.”
So, in other words, they posed with devices that were legally available for sale. And, of course, the weapons were not loaded at the time, which meant they were precisely as deadly as a cricket bat or any other similarly-sized chunk of metal or wood.
Both swimmers were penalised, as the ABC noted: “Nick D’Arcy and Kenrick Monk will be sent home from the London Games by the Australian Olympic Committee as soon as their swimming events conclude as punishment for their firearm photo controversy.”
Throughout this entire drama, nobody apparently remembered that the 2012 Australian Olympic squad included seventeen men and women who competed in fifteen Olympic shooting events—you know, with pistols, rifles and shotguns, all loaded and blasting away. Maybe those athletes would have found themselves sent home if at some point they’d jumped in a swimming pool.
To summarise. Being photographed in the US with unloaded weapons: bad. Firing loaded weapons in the UK: fine, no problem, let’s win some medals!
Australian media alarm over firearms emerged anew following the deaths of seventeen people in a Florida school shooting in February. That alarm increased when US President Donald Trump suggested arming teachers as a means of dissuading shooters from entering firearm-free schools, where the unarmed are nothing more than defenceless targets.
Trump’s idea, which he subsequently pursued, was greeted in Australia with scorn. Arming teachers? What kind of madness is this? How could adding further firearms be an antidote to firearm violence? (Oddly, our press never becomes so exercised about deaths in Democrat-run cities such as Chicago, where 771 people were murdered in 2016 and 650 were murdered last year. Likewise, the 4349 Chicago shooting victims in 2016 and the 3457 shooting victims in 2017 are rarely mentioned. Chicago has extremely strict firearms regulations.)
Anyway, the Australian press isn’t much interested in the fact that shooting sprees in US schools are invariably ended by guns. That is to say, guns that are brought into schools by police. Adding further firearms ends those horrific homicidal events. Trump’s guns-for-teachers plan would simply reduce the elapsed time between a killer commencing his or her spree and the conclusion of that incident.
The longer a spree continues, the greater number of people who will die. But throw some on-site defensive weapons into the mix and watch the body count decline.
There’s a reason why gun shows and gun shops are so rarely attacked. The same reason explains why areas that ban guns are so often selected for slaughter.
The UN is indeed a whore inbiblical terms-No offence to prostitutes whatever, please note. The UN does a little good, I forget what it is, but only as a cover. If an organisation is more bad than good, it is overdue to be ostracised and boycotted. A word about Australia’s carbon and methane footprint. Per capita it is high, per square mile of country not so. If all the people in the world had a per capita footprint as high as Australia’s, humanity would need seven, or whatever it may be, planets. Whenever a long and long-thought-out concoction of lies is trotted out, a narrative is built as a base to which the lies can be tied in and anchored and at the same time the refutations and disproof of the concoction of lies must not find ingress. Thus, the notion that the Australian people are responsible for the number of people occupying a country such as India or the People’s Republic of China must be implied in such a way that it cannot be up for scrutiny. By the same token, if Australians make the best of the resources thay have and are able to afford a rich, of sorts, on average, lifestyle, then the implication from the UN/Green/Corporate/Globalis one world government huffers and puffers is that all the people in the world, no matter how many occupy a certain nation-state or the measure of their industriousness and prudence, have an automatic claim to the average standard of living in, in this case, Oz. Due to Oz being related to colonial empire Great Britain, which messed up India and China as a consequence of which the peoples in these two colonised or messed up countries lost the urge to maintain a stable population, say, Australian can be said to responsible for the population increase in India and the People’s Republic. Moreover, Australians are by the same token responsible for ensuring that the growing populations of Indai and etc. will have in short order the same standard of living as that currently enjoyed, on average, by Australian citizens, residents and such Claytons citizens as deem themselves entitled to Australia’s standard of living.
Immigration is a matter decided by the host country, as the guest list is determined by the owner/occupier of a dwelling/household. If migration in the past was easy, that is no reason to assert with any logic that it must be so now and forever. The globalisation agenda has been long in the preparing. In the execution of it the narrative is handed down and maintaned and constantly calibrated with the specific agenda of the designers and executors in mind. The Greens and the acedemics, the body politics, the politicians and bureaucrats, they are all but passengers on the gravy train funded by hapless taxpayers and consumers. As soon as these hired hands cease to perform or be useful to the globalisers they will find themselves thrown off. No wonder the political operators supporting a hierarchy of lies sitting pretty on a crooked narrative are ever desperate to maintain the hype and in the face of lack of evidence brazen it out. They are BS.
Tim, I get the impression that Australian voters tolerate wild greenism the way they tolerate the mad relative at family gatherings. The trouble is, the mad relative is not so forgiving and pushes and pushes and pushes.
Both Tony Abbott and Donald Trump tested what people really believe, and won. That is, Uncle Arthur is mad.
Alas, in Australia we have gone back to humouring and enabling Uncle Arthur. Our large corporations are heavily invested in pretending that Uncle Arthur is perfectly normal. We don’t want any embarrassing scenes at family reunions.
Tim,
You are right on the money – though you will not get any from exposing the gravy train. Being an evil sort of person I am currently studying ‘Climate Change and ‘Carbon’ Storage’ through a formerly prestigious university. File it under ‘know thy enemy’. They provide some fascinating insights into the ‘hive mind’ of delusion. Even better are the comments of the conviction students. The course is taught by superior beings (they all have PhD’s). Doubt, enquiry, controversy and alternative views and the Popper scientific method are nowhere to be found. Of course, they must be right as these priests must surely be smart, honest, and after years of deep study, certain of their conclusions. After all, Kevin Rudd (apologies if this reminder sends readers back to another therapy session) said we must ‘trust and believe’ the priests in long white coats carrying thermometers and clipboards.
I was about to comment on “https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/04/assault-trust/” when your article popped up. I think it provides an answer as to why so many sane and rational people no longer trust authority. I still cannot get over Turnbull/Frydenberg telling us with a straight face that pumping water uphill will solve our energy problems. As 20%+ goes into the pumping uphill we could improve the efficiency by just turning off the hydro taps when consumption drops … Du, Homer, whooda thunk ..? No need for useless batteries and a multi-$Bn outlay. But then again, how smart are Ozzie politicians and the people who vote for them …?
Oz is beyond saving when we have a CDF commanding those tasked with defending us (by killing our enemies) who thinks the main enemy is the climate – and directs resources to fighting it (Admiral Barrie) Surely the nadir of an ineffectual military? Unfortunately, this was followed by a CDF who (still) considers the big issue to be discrimination, nasty words, the lack of diversity and supporting LBTIQWERTY troops (General Morrison). Our Manchurian Candidate Stuart Robert, MP declared the Orwellian ‘Diversity is Strength’, in defiance of logic that says ‘Unity is Strength’. Your football team analogy supports which view. Readers can have three guesses.
Could we descend any further into insanity? Well, apparently so as the incoming CDF, Angus Campbell) wants to ban ‘symbols of death’ and to kill our enemies with ‘humility’ and as rarely as possible. I would consider that this makes him ‘unfit for command of the killing machine that is the role of our Army. What next? Banning weapons as not in the interests of harmony and negotiating with the enemies trying to kill us? Sounds like the Green Defence policy.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/defence/soldiers-banned-from-displaying-symbols-of-death-by-new-defence-chief-angus-campbell/news-story/25346fdb352cc23a9ff4ea9931bac90a
No doubt Campbell would have had the vapours on receiving Churchill’s directive to the new Commando squadrons established in 1940 to ‘Set Europe on fire and butcher and bolt in aggressive raids that kill as many Germans as possible’. In the new Oz army, warriors need not apply, but ‘jessies’ are welcome in our new caring-sharing non-lethal war machine.
Don’t waste time asking me again why I moved overseas …”
But then again you never could trust a Campbell, just ask any MacDonald from Glencoe .
Indeed. Reading the words of Private John Casey this morning in the Oz regarding the Australian attack on Villers-Bretonneux on the night of April 24 1918:
“Terrible fighting.. gutters running with blood. Bayonet fighting in the houses and rooms” A Seargeant in the attack said the diggers “killed and killed” in a blood lust.
This is not to condemn them, but to commend them, and to show how nancy and spineless our current leaders are.
‘Nancy and spineless’
These words are too good to describe the likes of Turnbull, Bishop, Pyne and the other lookalike idiots, add Shorten, Bowen and ? (who is that idiot woman from zSydney) and their union clone mates.
This lot make Nancy and spineless people look good.
From the article here:
> “Climate obsessives don’t yield so easily to logical barriers”
Nor do the MSM, or indeed those of the middle-class guilt persuasion. Most people simply lack the imagination to understand the imposts of a life constrained by a rationed, expensive and unreliable power supply.
The Rudd appointee to the ACCC, one Rod Sims, recently opined that “we” (the Royal we, this was not), could well live with random power losses. Try living in a 23rd floor apartment when the elevators stop unexpectedly, the air flow (air conditioning) stops for several days, the garaged EV cannot be recharged, even if one could get to the ground floor to use it, the supermarket has by strict legal requirement jettisoned spoiled food and restocks cannot be accessed until the power is returned. Well said, our Rod.
The Tas Basslink to Victoria’s LaTrobe lignite-powered generators is down again and may be another 4 weeks in repair. Either the dams are emptied, the diesels are resurrected as in the last Basslink mess, or Tasmanians experience the reality of Sims’ blithe stupidities. But:
“Climate obsessives don’t yield so easily to logical barriers”
“Climate obsessives don’t yield so easily to logical barriers”.
Nor does the “without-bias-or-agenda” ABC, especially the Science Show.
It never seems to get beyond the red herrings to the real issue – causation. Eg:
Denial a coping mechanism for climate change
Saturday 21 April 2018 12:24PM (view full episode)
The evidence for a fast warming world collects day after day. Summers longer and hotter. Oceanic heat waves. Arctic ice being replaced by open ocean. Can anyone honestly say it isn’t happening? Well yes! There are some who continue to beat the drum saying it’s all wrong. They bleat of hoax and conspiracy. We hear from a scientist and would-be scientist who don’t see it or feel it or point to explanations other than greenhouse gases trapping heat. Then engineer Arek Sinanian looks to psychology to explain why some people deny climate science.
Source: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/denial-a-coping-mechanism-for-climate-change/9680300
No genuine sceptic, of course, “denies” CC is “real” and “happening” somewhere in the world.
That’s what the climate does, it changes.
As for “climate “stability”, it only exists in the UN and Garden of Eden.
Given that Australia is the largest CO2 emitter in the world, I dont understand why we haven’t be put in charge of the IPCC.
Might I suggest revisiting the ‘Mad Max’ scenario in the Quadrant article in the July 2015 magazine: “Powerless in Dubai”. This is where we are deliberately headed.